Inching Near an Iran Nuclear Deal, Negotiators Go Silent

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Secretary of State John Kerry, third left, Secretary of Energy Ernest J. Moniz, second left, and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France, right, meeting in Vienna on Tuesday.CreditCreditPool photo by Joe Klamar

VIENNA — Iranian and American negotiators made significant progress on Monday toward a historic nuclear agreement and have narrowed the list of final issues, several diplomats involved in the talks said.

While the negotiators have moved closer to announcing an accord — an announcement could be as early as Tuesday — they said the deal remained fragile and warned that last-minute hitches could emerge as they reviewed pages of text that define limits on Tehran’s nuclear capacity and the lifting of Western and United Nations sanctions.

The agreement runs more than 80 pages, including annexes, and covers the pace of research and development on advanced uranium enrichment, the size of nuclear stockpiles over the next 15 years and the pace at which oil, financial and other sanctions will be lifted. If a deal is announced in the coming days, Congress will have 60 days to review it, and opponents of the deal in Congress and in Israel made clear on Monday that they planned to make the most of that time.

Most of the key negotiators went virtually silent on Monday. After predicting day after day that a nuclear accord was imminent, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told reporters on Monday evening that there would be no agreement on Monday night, and this time he made no predictions.

Mr. Zarif’s terse declaration — that he was “sleepy and overworked,” a description that appeared to describe most of the negotiating teams — seemed to reflect continuing debates over an array of matters. Among them was the question of how long a United Nations Security Council ban on the sale or purchase of conventional arms and ballistic missiles would remain in place.

The nuclear issues at the heart of the agreement — nuclear research and development, the amount of low-enriched uranium, the number of centrifuges Iran can keep, among others — appear to have been settled.

The arms embargo remains an issue of enormous political sensitivity on all sides. Iran considers the bans, contained in several Security Council resolutions, to be an affront, while the United States and Europe do not want to see Iran using billions of dollars in newly unfrozen cash and weapons to project power around the Middle East.

Iranian officials apparently believed that the issues would be resolved by now and that they would move directly to celebrating an accord that let them keep almost all of their nuclear infrastructure, even if much of it is disassembled and its operations limited for over a decade.

In an apparent sign of their eagerness, the office of Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, erroneously issued Twitter messages too soon, declaring: “#IranDeal, is the victory of diplomacy and mutual respect over the outdated paradigm of exclusion and coercion.” The posted message was soon deleted, subsequently reappearing in slightly edited form, beginning, “If #IranDeal, ....”

As the talks have entered their critical final phase, Secretary of State John Kerry has become quieter. When reporters were ushered into a meeting he held today, Mr. Kerry maintained a stony silence about how the talks were going. He did not even repeat his talking points from Sunday about how he was “hopeful” but that “work remains to be done.”

No American officials would brief reporters, apparently concluding that anything they said might be seized on by the opposition in Washington or Tehran.

“Even over the weekend, as Iran continued to receive more and more concessions at the negotiating table, Iranian President Rouhani led a march of hatred in the streets of Tehran in which the masses cried: ‘Death to America! Death to Israel!’” he said. “If the concessions continued even after these unequivocal calls for the destruction of those conducting the negotiations, it seems that there are those who are ready to make an agreement at any price — and this bad agreement is unavoidable.”

The comments were notable because in recent weeks, with a deal imminent, Mr. Netanyahu has kept a comparatively low profile. There was a sense in Israel that he had overplayed his hand when he denounced the negotiations before a joint session of Congress. But on Monday he suggested that Israel’s sabotage campaign against Iran’s nuclear program would continue.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry have clearly been taking their time, sensitive to the critique that they wanted a deal too badly. Whether Mr. Kerry is willing to walk away over the arms embargo, though, is hard to tell. Administration officials acknowledge that the embargo is often violated and that giving up on the talks would mean forgoing more than a decade of nuclear limits because of an inability to negotiate restrictions on nonnuclear arms.

One senior administration official said that while there was confidence Iran would agree to some period of time to limit its arms trade, “they don’t want it for very long, and we want it for as long as humanly possible.”

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Inching Near Iran Nuclear Deal, Negotiators Go Silent. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe